Stacking ’em high at the British Library Photograph: Clive Sherlock/PR

Hard times or great expectations? I have just been sent a rare books catalogue from RA (Rick) Gekoski, the former Booker Prize judge and distinguished antiquarian bookseller. Before you stampede in horror to the Azed crossword, let me clarify my position. I'm not usually susceptible to the hushed, twilit world of first editions and its strange jargon ("contents fine"; "somewhat rubbed"; "slightly foxed").

But Gekoski's Catalogue No 33 (abebooks.com) is different. Far from dusty, it offers a vision of a paradise lost: inscribed first editions of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Waugh, Woolf and Wyndham Lewis, together with "autograph letters" from Dylan Thomas and DH Lawrence.

Perhaps because there has been so much commentary about the redundancy of print, the demise of the press and the dawn of the ebook, I became immersed in Gekoski's catalogue like Keats in Chapman's Homer. It's certainly a realm of gold. Here, valued at £15,000, is an extremely rare first edition of Prufrock and Other Observations (the Egoist Press, London, 1917). Gekoski advertises "a very good copy in the slightly rubbed and discoloured original wrappers". To put it another way, that's brown paper and plain typography, with the author's name in a measly 15 point.

It's less than 100 years since Eliot's debut, yet Gekoski's catalogue, and others like it, opens a window on a literary world as remote as the Regency. These fabulous first editions belong with the missal or the codex, which probably explains their staggering prices (from £5,000 to £25,000.)

Any first-time writer today, working on a laptop at the kitchen table, could produce a more attractive-looking volume than the Egoist's Prufrock. More fundamentally, they might not even bother. For instance, Australian poet John Kinsella has laboured for many years as co-editor of the Kenyon Review, an important US literary magazine. Today, however, he publishes new poetry on the internet at the online magazine Salt (saltpublishing.com).

In the world of pdf files and email attachments, the existence of words becomes increasingly virtual. I have a friend, for instance, whose new novel, due to be published in the autumn, exists at the moment exclusively on a memory stick.

So is Gekoski's catalogue, you begin to wonder, a monument to an irretrievably lost world? The answer, I think, is yes - and no. More probably, this discreet inventory dramatically illustrates the parallel worlds of modern literature and creativity. Unlike Virginia Woolf or Dylan Thomas, inveterate scribblers, we no longer write hundreds of letters, but we still generate countless emails. Will a future Gekoski carefully catalogue bookish texts and tweets?

No question: there are more books published than ever before. Never mind the quality (that's for posterity), feel the width. Like Nathaniel in Love's Labour's Lost, we seem to be eating paper and drinking ink. Rarely, in our history, has there been so much literary activity from festivals to creative writing groups. The UK's creative economy, much of it based on the English language, is estimated to be worth £85-£100 billion. But what does this mean? Is it a golden age or a last hurrah? No one knows.

I remain optimistic. The paperback did not eliminate the hardback, nor the word processor the pen and ballpoint. People still buy notebooks and pencils (I'm using one now). In the evolution of information technology, the innovations are usually add-ons. Besides, the DNA of self-expression is so deeply encrypted that literary outcomes are impossible to predict. All you can say for certain is that words will continue to accumulate, in the most unpredictable ways, and strangest formats.

John Berger, a great visionary, has just given his archive to the British Library, following Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter. Berger's collection is not on a memory stick, but stored in a barn, somewhere in the French Alps. "We're not quite sure what condition it will be in," said the BL's archivist, "and what else will be coming along with it, in terms of insects."